Now their is proof the IRS and Treasury Department secretly drafted rules to target conservatives. This email shows the IRS’s Lois Lerner and Treasury Department conspired to draft new 501(c)(4) regulations targeting conservatives.

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Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) revealed this email yesterday during House Committee on Ways and Means committee hearing with the IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

The Obama administration’s Treasury Department and former IRS official Lois Lerner conspired to draft new 501(c)(4) regulations to restrict the activity of conservative groups in a way that would not be disclosed publicly, according to the House Committee on Ways and Means.

The Treasury Department and Lerner started devising the new rules “off-plan,” meaning that their plans would not be published on the public schedule. They planned the new rules in 2012, while the IRS targeting of conservative groups was in full swing, and not after the scandal broke in order to clarify regulations as the administration has suggested.

The rules would place much more stringent controls on what would be considered political activity by the IRS, effectively limiting the standard practices of a wide array of non-profit groups.

“Don’t know who in your organizations is keeping tabs on c4s, but since we mentioned potentially addressing them (off -plan) in 2013, I’ve got my radar up and this seemed interesting…,” Treasury official Ruth Madrigal wrote in a June 14, 2012 email to Lerner and others obtained by Ways and Means and provided to The Daily Caller.

Ways and Means chairman Rep. Dave Camp blasted the off-the-record plan during a hearing Wednesday with IRS commissioner John Koskinen, and called for the administration’s newly proposed 501(c)(4) rules to be halted until criminal investigations into the IRS targeting scandal are complete.

It looks like President Obama was just caught in another lie.

The IRS was targeting conservative groups despite what he told Bill O’Reilly.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Thursday blasted President Barack Obama’s recent claim that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” involved in the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups.

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“The president says there’s not a ‘smidgeon’ of criminality or corruption,” Gowdy said during a House Ways and Means hearing on the IRS scandal.

“Do either of you,” he said, addressing two Tea Party leaders who appeared to testify on their experiences with the IRS, “remember seeing a witness named Lois Lerner, sitting at the very table y’all are sitting at?”

Lerner, formerly in charge of the IRS’ tax-exempt organization division, ignited the scandal in May after she apologized for the agency’s handling of conservative groups. She later invoked the Fifth Amendment and resigned her post in September.

“Do you remember her invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege? The same privilege that she targeted some of your groups for trying to educate people about?” Gowdy asked. “Some of your groups just want to simply educate people about the Constitution – the one she availed herself of the very second she was exposed to criminal investigation.”

“So how can the president say there’s not a ‘smidgeon’ of criminality when Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment? Forty-one witnesses haven’t been interviewed, including the two who are here right now!” he added. “How can he possibly draw that conclusion?”

Watch the South Carolina representative’s heated take on Obama’s assessment:

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One of the most high-profile victims of the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal is planning to unveil surprising new allegations about the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at a hearing this morning.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the head of election integrity group True The Vote and Tea Party group King Street Patriots, alleges Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) demanded information from her group in a similar manner to the IRS, according to her testimony. “Hours after sending letters, he would appear on cable news and publicly defame me and my organization,” Engelbrecht said.

The Tea Party leader is filing a formal ethics complaint against Cummings with the Office of Congressional Ethics, a panel of outside advisers who review allegations and refer those they consider to have merit to the official Hosue Ethics Committee.

Engelbrecht is one of several witnesses testifying at an oversight subcommittee hearing on the IRS scandal on Thursday. The committee’s subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs will be holding a hearing titled: “The IRS Targeting Investigation: What is the Administration Doing?”

In her opening statement, published on the committee’s website late Wednesday, Engelbrecht offers the painstaking details of how the IRS and administration as a whole targeted her, noting “my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, and family have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies.”

Engelbrecht said she is disgusted with Cummings’ behavior, and that Cummings was engaged in activity that “misrepresent[s] this governing body in an effort to demonize and intimidate citizens.”

“Such tactics are unacceptable,” Engelbrecht wrote in her prepared testimony. “It is for these reasons that immediately after this hearing I am filing a formal complaint with the House Office of Congressional Ethics and asking for a full investigation.”

Earlier in her testimony, Engelbrecht lumped Cummings’ actions in with those of the administration, writing that after she filed IRS papers to create her groups, “an assortment of federal entities – including law enforcement agencies and a Congressman from Maryland, Elijah Cummings – came knocking at my door.”

It is highly unusual for a witness at a hearing to announce she is filing a formal ethics complaint against the ranking member of the committee holding it. Cummings’ office did not respond to a request for comment sent late Wednesday.

Cummings has been a Democratic thorn in the side of oversight efforts of full committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and other committee Republicans on the IRS scandal since he ascended to the top Democratic slot on the committee in 2010.

Cummings released sensitive investigation documents this past summer, including a redacted transcript of an interview committee investigators conducted with IRS employee John Shafer. Cummings did so, according to an NPR story on the matter, because he said the transcript “debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases.”

But Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said in response to that renegade Cummings action that it “will severely undermine the Oversight Committee’s ability to gain the full truth of what has transpired at the IRS.”

“Since he called for an end to this investigation, we have learned that IRS officials in Washington had been more involved in the targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups than we initially were lead to believe,” Turner said then. “This maneuver will do nothing more than obstruct the Committee’s investigation. It’s clear that Ranking Member Cummings is concerned only with ending a highly embarrassing and troubling investigation before we learn the full truth of who was responsible and why.”

On the Benghazi scandal, Cummings outed a trip Issa was taking to Libya – something Issa’s office feared could have put the chairman in danger as terror threats were being made against Issa’s life at the time by a Libyan national.

Testifying along with Engelbrecht at Thursday’s IRS hearing will be American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) chief counsel Jay Sekulow, Alabama’s Wetumpka Tea Party president Becky Gerritson and lawyer Cleta Mitchell of Foley & Lardner LLP. Barbara Bosserman of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is invited to testify, according to the House Oversight Committee’s website but has not confirmed.

Appearing on Fox News Channel’s Special Report on Wednesday, conservative columnist George Will said the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Services’ targeting of conservative groups is as serious as Watergate or Iran-Contra. The distinction between those scandals and the one involving the IRS, he said, was that the press covered those earlier controversies heavily while they have largely dismissed the latest.

Will began by recalling that, immediately after former IRS official Lois Lerner preemptively apologized for targeting conservative groups, President Barack Obama called the scandal “outrageous.” Lerner would go on to resign and refuse to testify before Congress about the details of the scandal.

Today, however, Will noted that the scandal has evolved to a point where the president dismisses the IRS’s actions as mere “boneheaded decisions.”

He added that the nation’s capital has seen three major scandals “involving the distortion and abuse of institutions” in the past 40 years; Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and the IRS targeting scandal.

“The first two were ravenously covered by the media – they were Republican presidents’ problems,” Will said. “This is not being pursued and the president knows that. Hence, his sense of weariness and boredom as he discussed this with Bill O’Reilly.”